Is it worth freezing the Russians?

Many years ago, in 1994, in Izvestia, I published a note “Face to Face with an American Bureaucrat” - it was in the form of an open letter to the then US Ambassador to the Russian Federation and concerned the work of the visa service. And now, 24 years later, I am writing again

The current visa service of the US Embassy in Moscow - not what it was then, in 1994 - is now located on the first floor of the new embassy building in Bolshoy Devyatinsky Lane, between the old building overlooking the Garden Ring, where in August 1991 three were killed under an armored personnel carrier man, and less old, but very scandalous: in the days of the USSR, the KGB stuffed the building with wiretapping, carefully installed at the stage of manufacturing building blocks in the "firm of friends" in Finland. A “cap” was put on this building, another one was built nearby - it was a real long-term construction, American newspapers wrote that the building began to function 15 years late. But before they had time to cut the red ribbon, Putin, in response to the closure of the Russian consulates in San Francisco and Seattle, expelled 755 employees of the embassy and its representative offices in different cities of the country from the country; minimum staff, they began to go to Tbilisi, Kiev and Vienna for an ordinary visa, in Moscow only visas for students and professors traveling to American universities remained available. Back at the embassy discovered a Russian spy , and even earlier it turned out that, solving the problem of a shortage of guards, who had to be reduced in order to fit into new quotas, a company was hired to ensure security, which was associated with the FSB .

And yet.

Their

The time for the interview was scheduled online. What is its meaning, if since 1990, when I was first released to the USA from the USSR, I have been getting a visa, probably for the tenth, if not fifteenth time, and how many times they wrote “fingers” and I’m tired of counting, I don’t understand . It is necessary - it is necessary, fifteen minutes before the appointed 10:00 am I was on the spot.
It wasn't there. In the next three hours, I regretted many times that I did not fly to Tbilisi or Kyiv, where, among other things, plus on the street.
The first line was to the brown booth of the Russian police. The fact that this is not the police, but the 15th regiment of the FSB is an open secret. The lieutenant speaks accordingly: he collects passports and carries them in a bunch to the booth - there they either photocopy, or transfer the image - which is most likely - to colleagues in the Lubyanka. Why the FSB needs to know who receives student and professorial visas to the United States, one can only guess. Meanwhile, the line, shivering in the cold - the temperature is below zero, did not resist the selection of passports at all: if they demand it, then they have the right. Actually, no, they don't. When asked why passports were being taken away, the lieutenant, in the usual boorish manner of talking with enemies of the people - and who else, if they go for a visa to the enemy - answered: “Have you heard the law on the police? Article 13, paragraph 2 - the right to check documents. In fact, St. 13.2 lists cases that give the right to "check the identity documents of citizens": none of the items from this list fell in line, and the officer did not have the right to seize their passports, especially foreign ones, and take them to the premises - like this specified in relevant laws, decrees and regulations. The senior, major, called at my request, explained that they were checking passports for their authenticity (sic!), but, however, he did not insist on his interpretation of the laws of the Russian Federation, he did not demand a passport from me: “We know you, come in.”
It was proposed to pass under a plexiglass visor: on the street, in a slender line to the two windows of an aluminum-glass building, exhaling steam, clapping their hands and stamping their feet from the cold, stood about sixty people. And it was already an invention of the US Consulate. Most of the queue consisted of young people, clearly students, but there were also couples with children, including those in their arms. After 45 minutes, without feeling my limbs at all, I went up to the window: a young man in a T-shirt and a light jacket, a Russian, was sitting behind thick glass, who was talking cheerfully with a Russian colleague who was sitting next to me. I had to interrupt their sweet chirping - I really wanted to be warm, to which the young man, giggling joyfully, said: "Whether it will be in December." Indeed, it was quite difficult to imagine how people would stand in those lines during the winter months.
The young man checked my passport - this was the only reason for standing this forty-five-minute queue and pointed to the door on the side - it led into the building, into the heat. There are four guards, all Russians, unloading everything and everyone into the tray and passing through the frame of the metal detector. I will meet with these men again that day, and again I will ask myself the question: what HR selected for work in the American consulate people more like security guards, which I met at the entrance to Butyrki and Matrosskaya Tishina? Or did the FSB help here too?
Next was a large, long hall, with about twenty (plus or minus) windows, of which half were working. Why was it necessary to freeze people first on the street? "Can't you see that the hall is full?" was the answer. No I did not see. There were indeed a lot of people - my turn came only after two hours, but it was easy to build another line of people - if someone thought about it.
My Jewish happiness didn’t change me either: it turned out that the young man who was giggling in the annex on the street was so busy flirting that he put some wrong bar code on my passport. This meant that I had to leave the building (“where did you go?” growled another prison-looking comrade when I turned the wrong way), stand again at the window on the street, again get a slap on my passport, unload everything from my pockets again. And here, yes, there were headphones for the iPhone in the jeans pocket, I didn’t notice when I shook everything out and left it in the car, the guards didn’t notice when I passed for the first time. From one thought that again in the cold and again in a circle I was not well. Can I leave it here, on guard, or throw it out the door? - I asked. No, the eldest cut me off, recognizing me and receiving visible and special pleasure from his power over a famous person: "only outside the embassy." Well, my mistake - I'm crying. The question is to whom. Outside, under a plexiglass visor, a woman with a broom and dustpan was offering her services, standing next to the guard. Others also suggested: on the street, in front of that very Lubyanka police booth, there were already two cars on which it was written: "We save things." 500 rubles - you can have a backpack, you can have headphones - the price is one.

Aliens

I was given a visa: an American who spoke decent Russian asked a couple of obligatory questions - about Harvard, my PhD, what I do now - the whole interview took 10 minutes at the most. The remaining two hours and fifty minutes fell on rudeness, humiliation and the queue.

The last - the queue - is apparently inevitable and understandable. Everything else is not. It is clear that relations between Russia and the United States are now at a freezing point - but this does not mean that it is worth freezing ordinary Russians in line on the street. Now it seems that only those with whom diplomats meet behind the closed doors of high and/or richly decorated offices matter. But this is also deceptive. In the end, it is the young people who are now behind visas to the consulate in Moscow, having received an education in the United States and having learned that it is not worth it for a person in uniform to give up his rights so easily, returning or not returning to Russia, will build future relations between our countries — through their businesses, research or children. Humiliation is a special feeling, it remains a thorn inside, it is poorly treated, they said at a seminar on media, morality and law at the University of Pennsylvania (UPENN), where I was invited last fall (my office, by the way, was exactly across the street from the new buildings of the famous business school, Warton Business School - Huntsmen Hall, Huntsman Hall, the father of the current US Ambassador in Moscow). Dozens of pages have been written on this score and hundreds of words have been said - from the Bible and Gandhi to Mandela and Weisel. And not only. “If you look at the United States from a distance of 10 thousand miles, from the realm of the communist dictatorship, then we are a bright light, we have everything,” said a well-known American politician . “We have innovation, wealth, functioning institutions of democracy, a constitution, the rule of law… But we are failing in terms of human relations, people’s respect for each other… The solution to this problem does not require institutions or anything else – it requires human effort, and only, and we are capable of solving it.” These words belong to you, the former governor of the state of Utai, the US presidential candidate for the 2012 primaries, to you, Mr. US Ambassador to the Russian Federation John Huntsman.